“…Multiplayer online games are an excellent domain for observing cultural evolutionary processes in action (Squire, 2012; Williams, Contractor, Poole, Srivastava, & Cai, 2011), and specifically for watching community-level cultural divergence in action. Their simple abstract settings and highly motivated, goal-oriented agents can make players amenable to boundedly rational elaborations of economic game theory and rational choice theory, especially for those interested in the science of social dilemmas and self-governance (Bainbridge, 2007; Castronova, 2006; Ducheneaut & Yee, 2013; Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, & Moore, 2007; Fiedler, 2009; Kim, Keegan, Park, & Oh, 2016; Kollock, 1999; Kollock & Smith, 1996; Kou & Nardi, 2014; Whitson & Doyle, 2013; Ross & Collister, 2014; Williams, Ducheneaut, Xiong, Yee, & Nickell, 2006). By identifying game situations that meet the criteria of general theories of human behavior, we present a strategy for using game situations to make generalizable claims, a view consonant with recent arguments that gameplay is structured by cultural constructs of the outside world and cannot appropriately be seen as luxuriating in a magic circle of its own context (Consalvo, 2009).…”